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Wednesday, 26 July 2017

Who Won the Battle of Jutland Bank?

“At
5.50pm [May 31st, 1916], Konig
and her sisters, still believing that they were in pursuit of the fleeing
Beatty, raced into a thick mist. At 5.59pm, they emerged from it to behold a
terrible sight: the [British] Grand Fleet spread before them across the
northern horizon. Twenty-four British dreadnoughts and a host of cruisers and
destroyers were 16,000 yards away, racing towards them at 20 knots”.

“Castles
of Steel”, Robert K. Massie

The Greatest Sea Battle

Alphen, Netherlands. 26
July. This is summer, a time for reflection. At present I am preparing a speech
on the future of naval warfare, and finally completing a model of HMS Iron Duke, the flagship of the Royal
Navy in 1916, which has taken me three times as long to build as the real ship!
Thus, my mind has been cast back to a previous age and a controversy that has now
raged for over a century, albeit in an increasingly small academic circle
(storm in a tea-cup?): who won the Battle of Jutland Bank, and what, if any,
are the lessons for naval warfare today and tomorrow? This brief essay will thus
consider several aspects of the battle; materiel, tactics and leadership, firepower
and performance, the place of the battle in British war strategy, why the
controversy, and, finally, what lessons does the battle provide for naval warfare today...and tomorrow.

The argument over the
Battle of Jutland Bank is by and large a peculiarly British contention between
three main schools, all three of which imply the Royal Navy suffered a defeat
on that grey day in May 1916. The arguments can be thus summarised: the Royal
Navy missed a great opportunity to inflict a second Trafalgar on the German
High Seas Fleet; the Royal Navy was very badly-handled during the battle; the
British materiel was markedly inferior to that of their German opponents; and
that lingering contentions within the late-Victorian and Edwardian naval
establishments resulted in a Royal Navy in 1916 in which strategy, tactics, targeting
and signalling were hopelessly behind technology and firepower. Something which
perhaps contemporary naval commanders might ponder.

The Battle of Jutland
Bank

The Battle of Jutland
Bank began at 1545 hours on 31st May, 1916, when the British
battlecruiser HMS Lion, flagship of
Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty’s Battlecruiser Fleet, reinforced by the four
mighty ‘15 inch’ gunned (muzzle diameter) super-Dreadnoughts of the Queen
Elizabeth class, opened fire on the German battlecruiser SMS Lutzow, flagship of Vice-Admiral Franz von Hipper’s Scouting
Groups 1 and 2. The battle itself can be divided into four distinct sections. The initial ‘run to the south’ saw Hipper
gain a clear victory over Beatty as first HMS
Indefatigable, and then HMS Queen
Mary, blow up with the loss of almost all hands. The second phase of the battle has become
known as the ‘run to the north’. Beatty, realising he was being drawn by Hipper
onto the massed guns of the Dreadnoughts and pre-Dreadnoughts of Admiral
Reinhard Scheer’s High Seas Fleet, turns north (albeit clumsily) to escape. For
two hours Scheer and Hipper chase Beatty, the High Seas Fleet commander firm in
the belief that his strategy of isolating and then destroying a portion of the
much stronger Royal Navy was about to reap rich reward.

And then came what
historian Arthur Marder called the “the peak moment of the influence of sea
power upon history”. Locked in pursuit of Beatty Scheer and Hipper sail the
High Seas Fleet slap bang into the mighty trap laid by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe
and the entire British Grand Fleet. Even
as the Grand Fleet engages a third British battlecruiser, HMS Invincible, blows up, killing all but three of its crew of over
1000 men. Twice, in less than the ensuing
hour the entire British battle-line, huge white battle ensigns flying from
masts and halyards, hurls concentrated death down on the High Seas Fleet. Twice
Scheer expertly extricates his fleet from a second Trafalgar, but only at great
cost. For a time Scheer’s fleet is
trapped to the west of the Grand Fleet unable to get home to its port of
Wilhelmshaven.

What follows thereafter
is something of an anti-climax. The
night action is mainly between cruisers and destroyers, during which the
British succeed in destroying the German pre-Dreadnought battleship SMS Pommern, whilst in the morning the
modern German battlecruiser and Hipper’s erstwhile flagship SMS Lutzow is so badly-damaged that,
with the crew evacuated, she is sunk by a single torpedo from a German
destroyer. A mixture of skilful German ship-handling,
missed opportunities by the British, allied to a Grand Fleet that is
ill-prepared for night action, finally enables Scheer, Hipper and their
battered ships to slip past his British enemy and retreat to safety.

Materiel

The Battle of Jutland
Bank was a bit like Sparta versus Athens. As warfighting machines there can be
little doubt that most of the German ships were better designed and built
ships. By the time that the most modern German ships at the battle were constructed
Berlin had given up hope of a large overseas empire. Consequently, the Spartan German
ships were simply built with one aim in mind – to go out into the North Sea and
fight the Royal Navy to break the naval blockade Britain was imposing on
Germany. Given the greater weight of fire the British could on paper deliver
the ‘vital spaces’ of the German ships (engines, guns, magazines and command
and control infrastructures) had to be be very heavily-protected. Equally, Scheer
was also compromised. The presence of the slow, obsolete pre-Dreadnought Westfalen-class battleships greatly
reduced Scheer’s tactical freedom, whilst adding next to nothing.

By contrast, the British
ships at the battle were a compromise. Most were designed not just as
warfighting platforms, but were also critical to the Royal Navy’s imperial
policing duties and maintenance of imperial sea-lines of communication. In
other words, crews had to live on British ships for very long periods, whilst
their German counterparts did not. Worse, from a warfighting perspective, the British
battlecruisers were dangerously obsolete, even the new ones, reflecting an
ill-conceived and outdated belief back in the early part of the century that
speed rather than adequate armour afforded protection against falling, piercing
shot. This failure was reflected in the catastrophic loss of HMS Invincible, HMS Indefatigable, and themodern
HMS Queen Mary at the battle.

However, the ‘best’ ships
present at the battle were undoubtedly British. The four Queen Elizabeth
super-dreadnoughts were heavier, as fast, better armoured and had greater
firepower than any other ships at the battle.
Initially, the Fifth Battle Squadron, which the four ships formed, were
attached to Beatty’s Battlecruiser Fleet and were poorly handled. However, once
three of the four ships entered the main gun exchange (HMS Warspite had been badly damaged) their 15 inch/38cm guns
inflicted immense damage, particularly on the ships of the First Division of
the High Seas Fleet.

Tactics and leadership

Any tactical evaluation
of the four main commanders suggests the following ranking: Jellicoe, Hipper,
Scheer, Beatty.

Jellicoe: In
spite of being forewarned of the presence of the High Seas Fleet at sea by the
code-breakers and transmission-plotters of the Admiralty’s renowned Room 40 (a
forerunner of Bletchley Park), Admiral Jellicoe is poorly served at the tactical
level by his subordinate commanders about the course, speed and position of the
High Seas Fleet. Jellicoe battled tactical uncertainty and ambiguity right up
to moment when he hoisted his inspired signal, “Hoist equal speed pennant
south-east by east”. With this command Jellicoe deployed his mighty fleet from
six parallel columns into a single battle-line. With this command Jellicoe not
only opens the arcs of all the big guns of all his big ships, he closes the
arcs of the German ships by ‘crossing Scheer’s T’. In other words, Scheer’s fleet can only bring
the forward guns of his ships to bear on the already preponderant Grand Fleet.
Jellicoe also ‘seizes the light’ by forcing Scheer’s ships to be silhouetted
against a setting sun, whilst all Scheer can see of Jellicoe is when over the
space of a few minutes the horizon erupts into heavy gunfire across an arc from
north to east.

Hipper: In
the early part of the battle Hipper beats Beatty, plain and simple. Hipper is
dashing, brave, and yet methodical. His ships outgun Beatty’s, and he performs
far more effectively than Beatty in his role as scout for his
commander-in-chief. However, once his flagship SMS Lutzow is effectively shot from under him he effectively loses
command and spends much of the main phase of the battle scuttling from battered
battlecruiser to battered battlecruiser in a vain attempt to re-establish
command and control.

Scheer: Admiral
Scheer commands the High Seas Fleet with courage and resolution, and at 1836
hours masterfully extricates his fleet from pending disaster by making what, in
effect, was three handbrake turns or ‘battle-turns to starboard’. However,
Scheer makes two poor decisions which come close to denying Germany its fleet.
First, he should have realised that when Beatty headed north, rather than
north-west towards Britain, that there must have been a bigger British force
waiting for him over the horizon. Especially so when, towards the end of the
‘race to the north’, Beatty began to turn his ships to starboard, allowing
Scheer to close the range on the British commanders ‘big cats’, but at the same
time masking the approach of Jellicoe. His second poor decision is to reverse
his first ‘battle-turn to starboard’ and turn straight back into Jellicoe’s
massed guns. Scheer tried to claim after the battle that the decision was
partly a question of honour, and partly to rescue the doomed cruiser SMS Wiesbaden. One of his captain’s
suggested instead that Scheer had little idea where Jellicoe was, or indeed he
was even facing the full might of Jellicoe. It seems more likely that he tried
to slip around the stern of the Grand Fleet to get home, but got his
calculations horribly wrong.

Beatty: The
weakest commander at Jutland Bank is Beatty, and his weakness stemmed from his
attraction to Nelsonian tactics of a past age. Indeed, ‘engage the enemy more
closely’ may well explain why he allowed himself to get too close to Hipper’s
battlecruisers before opening fire. His larger 15 inch and 13.5 inch guns
should have enabled him to stand off from Hipper and inflict punishing damage
on the German ships which were armed with smaller 12 and 11 inch guns with a much
shorter effective range. Beatty’s
command style may also have had something to do with his failure at Jutland. Unlike Jellicoe, who had methodically trained
the Grand Fleet in accurate gunnery, Beatty believed in rate of shot (very
Nelsonian) rather than accuracy of shot. Worse, his demand for very fast rates
of shot led to short-cuts by his own gunners as they strove to get both shells
and cordite sacks into the guns. Anti-flash doors were locked open, which in
addition to the inherent concept and design flaws of the British battlecruisers
may also help explain the catastrophic loss of HMS Indefatigable, HMS Queen
Mary, and HMS Invincible. All
three ships succumbed to exploding main armament magazines.

Beatty also failed to
make any proper use of the four Queen Elizabeth-class super-Dreadnoughts
assigned to his command, possibly because of a personal dislike of the 5th
Battle Squadron’s commander, Evan-Thomas.
Their 15 inch guns would have devastated Hipper’s battlecruiser’s if
properly used. Beatty’s signals discipline was also appalling and he repeatedly
failed to provide Jellicoe with accurate information as to the location, course
and speed of the enemy.

Firepower and Performance

One of the many myths
about the Battle of Jutland Bank is that German gunnery was markedly better
than British gunnery. In fact, if one takes away the relatively poor shooting
of Beatty’s battlecruisers against the relative accuracy of Hipper’s gunners,
Jellicoe’s fleet performs well. Recent research shows that the Germans fired 2,424
12 inch shells and 1,173 11 inch guns. Of these 122, or 3%, were on target. The
British fired 4,480 15, 13.5 and 12 inch heavy shells, of which 123 were on
target, or 2.75%. However, a significant number of German shells were fired at
point blank range into HMS Warspite, which
temporarily went out of control, and other British ships that strayed too close
to the High Seas Fleet. In other words, British and German firepower
performance was roughly equal, and in fact British gunnery was more accurate
over a ranges above 8,000 yards. Interestingly, prior to the battle both navies
had assumed a hit rate of around 5%, rather than the 3% achieved. Fog of battle
and all that.

The Place of the Jutland
Bank in British War Strategy

It is Jellicoe’s decision
to turn away rather than towards Scheer as the latter covered his second
retreat from the Grand Fleet’s guns, with what appeared to be a massed
destroyer-led torpedo attack, which reveal Jellicoe to be a strategic leader,
not just a naval commander. Churchill
famously said that Jellicoe was the only man who could have lost the war in an
afternoon. When Jellicoe chose to defy the tyranny of Nelson and protect his Dreadnoughts
from torpedoes he would have known the criticism he would face. However, he
understood clearly that his mission was to maintain the naval blockade on
Germany as part of Britain’s war aims, and preserve the Grand Fleet as a mighty
fleet in being. Destruction of the enemy was an important but secondary
consideration to be achieved only if the tactical risk clearly suggested
strategic reward.

Why the controversy?

First, the British lost
more ships and men than the Germans. The British lost 14 ships of all classes
with 6,097 personnel killed, whilst the Germans lost 11 ships with 2,551 personnel
killed. However, whilst the British lost three battlecruisers to one German battlecruiser
at Jutland Bank, two of the British battlecruisers were obsolete. In strategic
terms the loss of the modern HMS Queen
Mary and SMS Lutzow were thus comparable.
The Germans also lost one pre-dreadnought battleship, SMS Pommern, which was even more obsolete than the British
battlecruisers lost. Second, the Germans got home first and exploited to effect
what today would be called ‘strategic communications’ to claim victory. In
fact, in his after-action report to Kaiser Wilhelm Admiral Scheer at one point
says that Germany must never fight such a battle again. Third, a jingoistic
British public and press had too high a set of expectations that a second
Trafalgar was imminent. The quality of German ships, commanders and crews under
Scheer bore no relationship to the state of the enemy Nelson faced in
1805. When the land war was not going
well, the British public tended to the belief that there was ‘always the Navy’.
The Royal Navy in 1916 was not just the largest navy in the world by far, it
was seen by much of the world as the finest fighting machine ever to grace the
planet. Fourth, Beatty was always
careful to cultivate his political and public image as an officer replete with
‘the Nelson touch’, whereas Jellicoe saw himself as first and foremost a
professional officer. When Beatty succeeded Jellicoe as First Sea Lord he did
all in his power to suppress any report that in any way presented his actions
at the battle as erroneous. He also embarked on a campaign that came close to
defaming the dignified Jellicoe by claiming that it was the latter’s caution
that prevented ‘Der Tag’ becoming the second Trafalgar.

The real damage to the
Royal Navy was perhaps a loss of reputation from which the Naval Service never
fully recovered. Ironically, it was Scheer’s respect for that reputation that
handed Jellicoe the upper hand. Scheer’s
behaviour when faced with the Grand Fleet suggested he too believed the legend
of the Royal Navy.

Lessons for Naval Warfare
Today and Tomorrow

The battle took place
just at the moment the relationship between strategy, command, systems and
naval platforms were undergoing revolutionary change. Put simply, by 1916 the
range of naval artillery was such that visual observation was inadequate in
most sea states to ensure accurate gunfire against fast moving targets armed
with similar firepower. Ironically, this conundrum was only solved right at the
very end of the Dreadnought age at the December 1943 Battle of North Cape. Admiral
Sir Bruce Fraser sank the German battlecruiser KM Scharnhorst with a system that linked the main 14 inch armament
of the battleship HMS Duke of York to
radar and a rudimentary computer. Quite
simply, the Scharnhorst never saw
what was coming. The solution to the
Jutland problem was in time to make the aircraft-carrier the main capital ship
of fleets. Aircraft became the heavy shells of their age enabling a fleet
commander to achieve accuracy of shot by putting human eyes on targets at
extended ranges.

Today, navies must contend
with weapons systems with super-extended ranges, able to travel at great speed,
possibly reinforced by robotic swarms of fully autonomous weapons with eyes on target
provided by remote electronic means. In other words the Jellicoes and Scheers of
the future will not have the time to calmly consider their options in battle. The
human decision-making loop is becoming dangerously slow when faced with interlocked
hyper-war systems. Equally, as an Oxford historian, the one constant between
the battle and the future of sea warfare is sea warfare has a future.

Who won the Battle of
Jutland Bank?

When suddenly faced with
the unexpected might of Jellicoe’s Grand Fleet Scheer fled the field. And, although Jutland Bank was not the second
Trafalgar the British public longed for, the irony of the battle is that to all
intents and purpose Jellicoe pretty much achieved the same result in 1916 as Nelson
had in 1805. The blockade was maintained, which in time would help force Germany
to capitulate, and the Germans came to realise that their huge investment in
surface capital ships had failed. Rather, they turned to the submarine and
unrestricted commerce warfare, which helped drag the United States into World
War One in 1917.

The ultimate testament to
Jellicoe’s victory came at 2145 hours on 2 June, 1916 when Jellicoe reported to
the Admiralty that his fleet was ready to sail at four hours’ notice with a force
of 25 Dreadnought and super-Dreadnoughts, 6 battlecruisers, 25 cruisers and 60
destroyers. It would be months before Scheer’s badly damaged fleet could sail
again in anything like strength. Had he been forced to act on 2 June the most
his fleet could have mustered was 12 battleships, both Dreadnoughts and pre-Dreadnoughts,
2 battlecruisers, 3 cruisers, and some dozen torpedo boats.

Who won the Battle of
Jutland Bank? That is the easiest question of all to answer; Admiral Sir John,
later the Earl Jellicoe GCB, OM, GCVO, SGM, DL. For, as the official German war
history states in support of Jellicoe’s critical decision at the critical
moment to deploy the Grand Fleet on the port wing and thus ‘cross the German
T’, “One must agree that…[a deployment on the right wing] would have been only
too welcome to the German fleet”.

The motto of the Royal
Navy is ‘si vis pacem para bellum’ (‘if
one wants peace then prepare for war’). It may not be as yet necessary to
prepare for war but Britain, Germany, and all the democratic allies, had at
least better start seriously thinking about it.

In memory of the officers
and men of both the High Seas Fleet and the Royal Navy who lost their lives at
the Battle of Jutland Bank.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.